Redefining the Family Farm

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About dennisjdennis

I am a Master's student at UBC studying land access for beginning farmers and models of alternative farmland tenure. I have been farming full or part time over the past 6 years and love the time I get to spend on farms.

If you haven’t yet seen, the call out for photo submissions is up. We are looking for queer farmers to participate in making an awesome queer farmers calendar – Homo Grown for the 2014 year by contributing a photo. The summary details are as follows:

What: Homo Grown – a queer farmer calendarWhy: queer farmer visibility!Who: queer-identified farmersHow you participate: send in a photoWhen to reserve a spot: by April 1st, 2013When to submit photos: by October 15, 2013

See the Homo Grown page for further details on how to participate and see the Farmer Tans page for some photos that were in our last calendar.

We want to distribute this call out as far as we can, so help us out!

If you know of any queer farmers or farmer organizations that may be able to help us reach out (anywhere in the world) please send along the link to our online call out:

The manly lumberjack icon is one icon loved by both bears and dykes (and now all those plaid wearing hipsters who are always two steps behind queer fashion)!!!

Bears,

butches,

and me.

Lumberjacks, alongside cowboys and sailors, despite being trades of a past era, have remained major icons in gay culture. Sailors, cowboys and lumberjacks were for a long time male only domains and are associated with stereotypical manliness. Yet these all male trades, requiring working in remote areas and living in camps with only other men were potent grounds from homosexuality, and as Willie Nelson puts its “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” (if you haven’t heard this song its great!)

Well not only did these all male domains create fantastic opportunities for hot gay hookups, they have also created fantastic opportunities for breaking down gender roles by those amazing women who ventured into the worlds of cowboys, sailors, lumberjacks and by your modern gender bending queers who take those icons of masculinity and embody them, perform them and distort them.

The reason I got to thinking about lumberjacks were these amazing images below that a friend sent me. They are from the national archive of Canada illustrating female work crews that took on these previously exclusively male jobs in all sorts of industries, including logging, during the second world war in Canada.

I know this post has nothing to do with farming per se, but I really wanted to share these photos, and there is a loose connection here between queer farming and breaking down gender roles in other natural resource industries…

These women look tough! and I can only hope, that like in those all male work camps, some hot queer hookups were happening in these female work crews!

Diversity extends from beyond the landscape and crops to the farmers tending those fields. I just read a couple of chapters from a book called Change Comes to Dinner by Katherine Gustafson.

Here is a little excerpt:

“The 2007 USDA Census of Agriculture reveals that the vast majority of farms in the United States – 1.83 million out of 2.2 million – are principally operated by white males. But as the diversity of the country increases – with current minority groups set to make up over 50 percent of the U.S. population in about thirty yearWFANs, according to the Census Bureau – the uptick in nonwhite primary farm operators is outpacing overall growth. While many of the farmworkers on the nation’s largest farms are Latino, the number of Latinos who own and operate their own farms in the United States is relatively low but growing particularly rapidly, having increased by 10 percent between 2002 and 2007. Another important development is an increasing diversity in gender across the U.S. agricultural landscape. The number of women farmers jumped by an eye-popping 30 percent during the same period, and the number of women who gain responsibility for land they inherit from their husbands is startlingly high. So while there’s apparently a good reason I always picture a farmer as white guy in a Monsanto hat, that white-male agricultural picture is slowly altering. There’s change a-foot: an increase in diversity that could really re-invigorate our food universe.”

The author goes on to describe two non-profit organizations doing really rad work. One of them is ALBA – the Agricultural and Land Based Training Association in Salinas, CA. ALBA is an incubator farm that offers courses in the basics of organic farming and business skills, and helps farmers get started on their own. The program is geared towards Salinas’ low income Latino population, many of whom are farm labourers on big industrial farms with less than ideal working conditions. The program is run in Spanish and the training occurs in the evenings and weekends to allow people who work to participate. The goal is to provide participants with the know-how to transition from farm labourers to making a living from running their own farm businesses.

The second organization I learned about is the Women, Food and Agriculture Network (WFAN) based out of Ames, Iowa. The organization facilitates various programs, the goal of which are to “empower women to build food systems and communities that are healthy, just, sustainable, and that promote environmental integrity” and to redress longstanding inequality in the agricultural sector. One cool program this organization hosts is a mentorship program where older generation female farmers are a paired with new young female farmers for hands on training opportunities.

If Katherine Gustafson’s writing is an indication of her personality she would be a pretty fun guest to have come to dinner, but more likely you will just have to read her book – Change Comes to Dinner.

I have been reading up on some young farmer organizations in the US and Canada and while reading the National Young Farmers’ Coalition I happily saw inclusivity of ‘every gender, race, and sexual orientation’ in their list of guiding principles. Supporting the interest of family farms is a foundational guiding principle of almost every farmer organization I have been reading about, and it is at the top of the list of the National Farmers’ Coalition, but it is at least refreshing to see that inclusivity and diversity made it into the guiding principles of this organization.

I have nothing against family farms, only against the heteronormative and conservative family values rhetoric that the concept of ‘family’ brings along with it. Hence Rainbow Chard Collective’s call to “Redefine the Family Farm!” To us family includes all the nontraditional and queer relationships that are out there – from queer couples, to poly-amory, friends raising kids, to intentional communities and chosen families and everything in between.

Copied from list of National Farmers’ Coalition guiding principles:

Farmers of Every Gender, Race and Sexual Orientation. We strongly support inclusiveness in the farming profession, and believe that diversity among farmers is critical to maintaining a strong and vibrant agricultural sector to provide for a diversity of consumers.
Click here to view the National Farmers’ Coalition’s website.

You may remember Mel as the babe on the tractor from the farmer tans calendar!! Well besides looking hot on the tractor, Mel is busy at work farming and finishing up a degree in agricultural sciences. Mel is quoted in this little write up on the UBC Farm in Vancouver where Mel works and you can check it out by clicking on the photo below.

The Rainbow Chard Collective has been on a bit of a hiatus as we have all been preoccupied with relocating, farming, building, learning, fighting for our farmland, saving seeds, and so many other things. But we are back together in Vancouver and Richmond and we have some exciting plans for the coming year, starting with building this website and trying to connect with as many queer farmers out there as we can!